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-B-
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The instance she had a quiet moment to herself, she unpacked the emotions that'd welled up like drawn blood at her first acceptance of the words written on her arm. 'A new life, in a different world, where she could expect no return to her previous state of familiarity.'
Sakura grieved for the loss of her previous life and all of the people and places she'd known. Anybody who could make crying look pretty was either trained to do so or faking it, and she was neither of those things. Perhaps out of compassion, or perhaps out of simple confusion, neither of the island's dominant populations approached her during her cathartic outpouring of feeling. Looking back, she felt a little silly over the minor crater she'd formed from slamming a fist over and over again into a patch of ground, but also pleased over this body's potential, and mostly just felt better.
(… Sakura didn't mourn for 'Jewelry Bonney', but she did feel a brief flash of… sympathy, perhaps. The girl was dead, or had never existed. She didn't know if there was anyone in this world to even remember her, except Sakura herself, who had—to take her own word for it—somehow rendered the identity unuseable.)
Afterwards, the nameless faceless blameless grief didn't neatly vanish; she compartmentalized it again. This time, with the intention of never revisiting. Healthier to let it all fade into purely fond memories, rather than dwell too strongly and taint the entire matter with festering frustration. Healthier than the vast majority of alternative coping methods pioneered by other ninja, anyway. Admittedly, if there hadn't been a total lack of alcohol on the island, and if she hadn't been so unsure about how her 'true' immature body would be affected by early alcohol intake, perhaps her flirtations with the idea of alcoholism—what could she say, Tsunade was a bad influence and she knew firsthand that Shizune was an honest drunk—wouldn't have gone nowhere.
She'd never touched any of their 'recreational herbs' as a replacement. By the time the natives were friendly enough with her to offer, Sakura wasn't desperate enough for an escapist fantasy to take them up on it. She couldn't do anything more than choke on her bite of salad and weakly wheeze out a polite refusal, stifling her increasing amusement.
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Sakura!Bonney: Part 2.5
Grief
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A/N: Part 3 covers her timeskip actions on Torino, and introduces Karate Island and a canon character. Part 4 introduces a second canon character, and will hopefully cover her Karate Island timeskip and get her started on sailing adventures. Guess the character(s)?
